Clear Eyes, Full Plates, Can't Puke

Continued (page 5 of 5)

"You've seen everything I do," Joey replied.

I turned to Pat. "Do you sometimes feel like Buzz Aldrin to Joey's Neil Armstrong?"

"For sure," he said. Despite the tough-guy mustache and scary Mohawk, there was a real sweetness to Pat. He seemed resigned to the fact that he has hit the ceiling, that he'll always be second best. And he's had enough, he said. He's getting out of this crazy sport.

He backpedaled slightly. "It's not that I want out," he said, "but I don't want to linger."

What he meant is that once you're number one, there's nowhere to go. Joey is trapped at number one like Pat is trapped at number two.

"My goal is seven [Nathan's titles] in a row," Joey said. "Next year could very well be my last."

"Do you also want to quit because you realize it's a bizarre way to live your life?" I asked him.

"Probably," Joey said.

The truth is, rarely have I done a story about something that's so utterly, existentially pointless and so emblematic of the American tendency to go way too far. And Joey and Pat know it.

"I'm more than just a competitive eater," Joey told us. "I'm a smart guy. I could be an awesome park ranger."

"That would be a great job," I agreed.

"A park ranger in Alaska!" said Joey. "You get a gun! 'Hey! Make sure you put out that campfire! Hey! Clean up your garbage!' "

Joey looked at me then, and he smiled.

···

Pictured: ribs

It's time for the women's contest. Which brings the first great surprise of the day. Maria Edible. She's a disaster. Onstage she looks ghostly white, in agony. She manages only eighteen and a half hot dogs (two fewer than her personal best). The winner for the second year in a row is Sonya Thomas, a.k.a. the Black Widow, the fourth-ranked eater in the world, who sets a new women's record with forty-five. I find Maria after it's over. She's slumped against a wall backstage. "I don't know what happened...," she's murmuring.

I want to ask her more, but the floor manager hurries in. It's time for the men to line up.

Halfway through the contest, something impossible seems to be happening. "Matt Stonie!" George Shea is yelling into the microphone. "Many are calling him the new Joey Chestnut! This is amazing, ladies and gentlemen! Matt Stonie is doing so well he's only four hot dogs behind Joey Chestnut. Nineteen years of age! And yet he's the only one truly putting pressure on Joey Chestnut!"

Matt is out in front of Bob Shoudt and Pat Bertoletti and Tim "Eater X" Janus. He's a man possessed, like Kobayashi on that famous day in 2001. He's gaining on Joey, all those years of pain propelling him on. Twenty-eight hot dogs, twenty-nine hot dogs, thirty hot dogs, thirty-one...

But then, suddenly, heartbreakingly, at thirty-four dogs into the contest, Matt hits a wall. ("Died out," he'll later say on Facebook.) The manic pace with which he'd been inhaling hot dogs slows dramatically, and a look of defeat crosses his flushed, sweaty face.

"Their dreams and hopes begin to fade as they approach the end!" George Shea hollers as Joey's lead widens. "If fate and destiny existed, they would surely concern themselves with the affairs of this man. But they do not exist! The future is the property of the iron-willed, and there is only one man who has an iron will and it is he, Joey Chestnut!"

The final score: Joey, sixty-eight (matching his world record); Tim Janus, fifty-two and a quarter; Pat Bertoletti, fifty-one. Matt ends up fourth, with a total of forty-six, a personal best. It's Joey's sixth Nathan's title in a row, tying Kobayashi's streak from 2001 to 2006. The audience—many of whom are wearing Joey Chestnut T-shirts and holding Joey Chestnut signs—is screaming his name as he stands before them, exhausted and utterly spent, basking in their love.

A few minutes later, as Joey wades triumphantly into the throng, holding his championship belt aloft, I remember something he told me a few months earlier: "I have to learn to ignore my feelings. Not just the feeling of hunger and the feeling of full, but the feeling of embarrassment, too. I have to remember that this is only weird if I make it weird."

Soon Joey is swallowed by the crowd, and I lose sight of him. All I can see now is the belt itself, its painted gold glinting in the relentless sun, bobbing along in a surging tide of red, white, and blue.

Jon Ronson's new anthology, Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries, comes out October 30.